Slinging slime or citing facts?

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Fractured as the bones of the body politic may be, we can all agree on
one thing: This will be the longest, grimmest, harshest campaign in living
memory. Right?

That's the conventional wisdom: It's going negative sooner than ever
before, and the mud being slung is particularly disgusting. Blame, of
course, the Republican Slime Machine, which will stop at nothing. Just
look at how it attacked Richard Clarke  by sending out operatives to
point out Clarke's contradictions. Heavens. Decent people everywhere
took to their fainting couches over that one.

Slimy? No. Saying your opponent dates a goat and likes to set cats on
fire is a slimy attack. Saying your opponent hangs around schoolyards
in a trenchcoat passing out cotton candy  slime. Saying your opponent
belonged to a group that took a vote on assassinating government
officials  that's slime. No, wait a minute, that's truth. John Kerry
belonged to Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and a proposal to kill
some senators was discussed and voted down at a VVAW meeting in
Kansas City, Mo., in 1971. Granted, Kerry says he quit the group just
before that meeting  but ask yourself whether such a subject ever
comes up in your social circle. Perhaps your book club regularly turns to
the question of which high government official you plan to kill, but most
people don't travel in such, ah, motivated company.

You want a hard ad, a tough attack? OK: "John Kerry, he's their man!
Can't stop blabbing about Vietnam! John Kerry, he's their guy! Shot a
man and watched him die!" Voiceover: "John Kerry may say he's for
people, but he's the only presidential candidate ever to admit killing an
Asian in another country." Cut to President Bush: "I'm George Bush, and
I not only approved this message, I never plugged a guy who was trying
to crawl back into the bushes."

That's a hard message. Until we hear ads like that, everyone needs to
chill. We still have a ways to go.

Latest example of slime: Dick Cheney accused Kerry, a liberal Dem from
Massachusetts, of having a pronounced affinity for raising taxes.

Whoa! The gloves are off!

Kerry's response: "They have found Dick Cheney in an undisclosed
location and brought him out to attack me," Kerry droned. (Ho ho.
Undisclosed location; that's novel. Next: Al Haig "I am in charge" jokes.)
"That seems to be his designated role  not to create jobs, but to attack
John Kerry." Speaking of one's self in the third person is usually
reserved for popes and kings, but we'll let that slide. Consider this new
job requirement for the vice president: creating jobs. Apparently there is
a big button on the veep's desk marked "MAKE JOBS," and Cheney not
only refuses to push it, he posts guards to keep others from depressing
it when he's away attacking John Kerry the First.

Nonsense, of course; the veep's job is to hang around should the head
man perish, not "create jobs." Governments don't create jobs. They help
create the conditions in which jobs are created, or lost. If the
government decides that it is good for workers to have paid family leave
to grieve for a lost pet (hamsters on up, although we can work in
goldfish in the next session), then employers might well decide to move
customer support from New Jersey to Bombay, where they speak better
English.

In any case: Yes, we lost jobs after the '90s bubble popped. It's called "a
recession." Then there was that whole war thing, which further
depressed enthusiasms. You might remember that. It was in all the
papers. But the Labor Department says that 2.2 million jobs were lost,
not 3 million, as Kerry said in his response to Cheney. One might ask if
he heard about these 800,000 workers from the foreign leaders who
endorsed him.

Sorry! That was below the belt. Remember, everything's fair game this
time. Except Kerry's record and public utterances. And if Kerry takes to
a St. Louis pulpit, quotes Scripture and suggests Bush is a lousy
Christian, well, that's hardly slime. Facts are facts.

G-d was unavailable for comment at press time.

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